dily. As the spring of '73 opened, there were alarms and rumours
of strife on every breeze, and youth was happy and breathed the fight
into its nostrils like a balsam. For all the world of Sycamore Ridge
was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men
who kept up the town. Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there
were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two
towns, and a martial spirit all over the county. And as John limped
about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was
coming into his own. But it was all a curious mock combat,--that
between the towns,--for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men
swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the
social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed.
Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and
dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and
festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war--and
sometimes more than that--to put a bar across the mating ground of
youth. So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for
Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town,
while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the
rival communities went on.

Dolan was made sheriff, and Bemis county attorney, and with those two
officers and a majority of the county commissioners the Ridge had the
forces of administration with her. And so one night Minneola came with
her wrinkled front of war; viz., forty fighting men under Gabriel
Carnine and an ox team, prepared to take the county records by force
and haul them home by main strength. But Lycurgus Mason, whose wife
had locked him in the cellar that night to keep him from danger, was
the cackling goose that saved Rome; for when, having escaped his
wife's vigilance, he came riding down the wind from Minneola to catch
up with his fellow-townsmen, his clatter aroused the men of the Ridge,
and they hurried to the court-house and greeted the invaders with half
a thousand armed men in the court-house yard. And in a crisis where
craft and cunning would not help him, courage came out of John
Barclay's soul for the first time and into his life as he limped
through the guns into the open to explain to the men from Minneola
when they finally arrived that Lycurgus Mason had not betrayed them,
but had rushed into the town, thinking his fri